This is Your Brain on Microsoft Paint

Yesterday I shook the foundations upon which our world is founded when I mopped the floor before cleaning the countertops.

This is a big deal. I’ve always had a certain preoccupation with efficiency. It’s this quality which made me an excellent runner for the law firm I worked at in college. I would first collect a queue of errands, arrange which stops would be made at which point in my route and the knock them out in sequence, always taking into consideration the projected busyness of the stop and the direction of traffic in relation to my preferred parking spot.

The proper order of operations for cleaning the kitchen is as follows: unload dishwasher, put dirty dishes into dishwasher, clear clutter away from counters, spray and wipe countertops, sweep the floor, mop. Always in the same order. When things are done in this way everything runs smoothly in the world.

Unfortunately I am in a season of life in which I am in charge of a clingy toddler and a 3-month-old baby. The counters have not been cleaned in a timely manner. Christmas crumbs have become more than seasonal residents on our floor. Dust bunnies sashay past me as I chase Lillian away from the cat food for the seventieth time every day. Over the course of two months I observed helplessly as a stain on the floor grew and darkened like a tumor. Conditions were never perfect enough to facilitate a good floor mopping. There was nothing I could do. It’s a sad, imperfect world we live in.

So then yesterday I swept the floor and mopped it while the dirty countertops looked on in jealous horror. Imperfect progress was made. Like I said before, it was a big damn deal.

This is your brain on Microsoft Paint

I often find myself frozen with indecision because there is no efficiency plan complete with bullet points to follow when I think about how I am going to live my life. I hate trying and then failing and trying again. I don’t always enjoy the confusing little twists and turns and full stops. Let’s not forget the full stops.

In times when I’m tempted to freeze and zone out I’m finding that I have to remind myself to continue on imperfectly and do little things while leaving the bigger picture to God. When I look back at my past it seems like a sad little squiggly line in which very little progress was made due to backtracking and changing direction.

I’m hoping that when you zoom way out, like all the way out, maybe the whole thing is leading straight toward some definite purpose imagined by God from the very moment that I became a thought bubble in his infinite imagination, and that all of the little twists and unexpected bumps actually sent me hurtling forward in his good time.